Hi, I'm Gus Wallin and this is Not An Overnight Success brought to you by Shaw and Partners
Financial Services.
This is a podcast where we sit down with some very successful people from the world of business,
entertainment and sport and chat about their life's journey and what got them to the position
that they're in today.
In today's episode, we are chatting with Billy Shaw.
Billy previously led a life in American politics as a senatorial and presidential campaign
He is now a founder and executive chair of Share Our Strength, the parent organisation
for the No Kid Hungry campaign.
Since founding Share Our Strength in 1984 with his sister Debbie, Billy has led the
organisation in raising more than one billion dollars, that's with a B, one billion dollars
Billy is a humble and compassionate man.
He has dedicated his life to serving and helping some of the world's most vulnerable people.
In this chat, we speak about his political career and get a bit of an insight into what
life amongst the White House is really like.
We talk about his family and what led him down the path of wanting to end world hunger.
We speak about his life as a professor and being a leader.
I truly feel as though there are very few people like Billy in this world.
As for all of these podcasts, Shaw and Partners have generously donated 10k to the charity
The Choice of the Guest.
We discuss who that money goes to in this chat.
The executive producer of this podcast is Keisha Pettit with production assistance from
Kelly Stubbs and Brittany Hughes.
Let's get into our chat with Billy Shaw.
So Billy, what were you like as a kid?
Oh boy, as a kid, I was kind of I was a little bit of a quiet kid, Gus, and a little bit
of a loner, but I had a very strong imagination.
I had a very rich fantasy life as a child.
Some days I was a soldier and some days I was a construction builder and some days I
was a firefighter and, you know, you name it.
But it felt very rich, kind of studious, a little bit on my own, actually.
My mom had a wonderful mom, but she was chronically depressed her entire life and ended up actually
dying of a secanol overdose at 54.
And so as I say, she was an incredibly loving mom, my dad as well.
But if you grow up a child of a depressed parent, you tend to walk on eggshells and
always be a pleaser and, you know, try to make things right.
And so I had a little bit of that in my childhood, which, of course, I didn't understand until
I got much, much older.
But, you know, as I started to think about it, I realized some of those formative things
that go on in your life.
Yeah, very, very tough.
Just even listening to that, I can't imagine living with that.
Which part of America did you grow up in and were you sort of middle class?
Were you upper class?
What was your sort of upbringing like there?
Yeah, so I grew up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, which was a, you know, on the East Coast and
a real steel town.
That's where all of America's steel came, particularly during World War II.
And you know, I was born in 1955, Gus, so that was, you know, 10 years after the end
And my dad served in the war for four years, you know, not in any particularly heroic way,
but was a sergeant in the army and said it was, you know, four years living in the mud
But I realized that, you know, when he came home, you know, 10 years ago, like, you know,
here in the U.S., we talk so much about 9-11, it was 20 years ago now.
And it's like it was yesterday.
So 10 years must have been nothing for him.
And I say that as a way of saying that he was very content to sit on our porch and listen
to a ballgame on the transistor radio and have a cigarette and talk to the neighbors.
So we had a very middle class, you know, probably lower middle class existence.
We never traveled once outside of Pittsburgh until the day I left for college.
I'd never seen the ocean until I was 19.
Never been to another city or state.
We had no shower in our house.
We had one bathroom and an old bathtub, but, you know, we obviously didn't feel like we
were missing everything. Everybody in the neighborhood lived the same way and was happy
and we played on the street with other kids.
And it felt like an idyllic childhood.
We just, you know, we didn't know what we didn't have.
What was it like when you first saw the sea?
You know, I wanted to see it so bad, because I remember taking a train from Philadelphia
where I was in school my freshman year of college to Boston to visit my girlfriend at
the time. And the attraction really was not my girlfriend so much as knowing that when we
got to Connecticut, we were going to see a little glimpse of ocean and then in Massachusetts
see a lot of ocean. And I've actually never gotten over that.
I've never stopped appreciating it.
Was sport a big part of your growing up?
You said your dad sitting on the porch listening to the ballgame.
That sounds like absolute heaven to me.
Did you used to sit with him?
Did you used to love sports, whether it was baseball or football or other sports?
Yeah, we did. I was a competitive swimmer.
Not a very good one, although a funny thing happened to me when I was in sixth grade.
Gus, I set a city record in Pittsburgh for the 25 yard breaststroke and I won that race
and set a city record and coaches descended on me from about three other states and I
ended up swimming for another 10 years.
I never again won a race, not once.
So it was a terrible mistake and it was a fluke, but I ended up swimming my heart out
for the next 10 years.
But yeah, we you know, Pittsburgh is also a big sports town.
Pittsburgh Steelers football team and baseball and everything else hockey.
Yeah, they were just you know, they were just really simple pleasures.
I wasn't a particularly competitive athlete.
And at what stage did you sort of start thinking about leaving Pittsburgh and and going
to college and all that sort of stuff?
Were you a dreamer of that from a young age or did you just go along the process and
said, OK, well, I finished high school now.
The next step is going away.
You know, I knew early on that I wanted to go work in Washington, D.C., which I ended
up doing, working in the Capitol in the Senate for Congress.
And my dad, my dad's job was he was the district manager for a member of Congress,
member of the House of Representatives here.
And so my dad didn't go away very often.
He was maybe gone one or two nights of my entire childhood.
But this was at a time when members of Congress didn't come back from the Capitol very
often. Congress wasn't televised.
So if my dad and I walked three blocks to go get a pizza and bring it home, that would
take a couple of hours because people would come out of their houses and say, you know,
Mr. Shore, can you my aunt lost her Social Security check?
Can you get her a new one? My uncle needs to go into the Veterans Hospital.
Can you get him in there? And so he did all these things.
And there was kind of like this very quiet, it was very quiet, softspoken guy, not
preachy at all. But there was this ethic of kind of service.
And, you know, that was just what I grew up with.
I guess if he'd been a banker, I'd probably wanted to be a banker.
But, you know, I just always wanted to go into public service that way.
And so I knew I was going to go to Washington, which I did literally the day after I
graduated college. I started banging on doors in Washington, D.C., trying to get somebody
to take me in. And did it take long before someone took you in?
It did, actually. And I was free labor.
I was I was trying to get a job as an intern, you know, an unpaid intern.
And it took about 12 or 14 weeks.
But at the time, in particular, I wanted to work for a senator from Colorado, Gary Hart,
who ended up running for president and who our mutual friend Hugh Jackman played
in a movie called The Frontrunner, which is how I got to know Hugh.
But, yeah, I wanted to work for Senator Hart.
And I just kept showing up every day. And they finally took me.
There was an opening. There was a guy.
Mail used to get delivered on Capitol Hill five times a day, you know, pre-internet,
pre-email. And there was a guy whose job it was to slice open the envelopes
five times a day. And I got hired to that glamorous position.
And how did you how did you go?
Were you a good sort of opener of envelopes?
I tried to be the best
because not so good that I get to do it forever, but good enough that I might get,
you know, elevated to do something else.
So, Gary Hart, as as you said, I was going to talk about The Frontrunner,
which Jacko played, you know, so well, I thought when I watched that movie,
I thought he's this guy who's got he can be president.
Like, that's why he was the front runner.
But he just mucked it up by not keeping his, you know, what in his pants.
What was it like being around someone like him?
Was he super charismatic?
Was he someone you went if he did do that, he would have been president?
I think so. He certainly had a good shot.
You know, kind of the irony is that he was a very serious,
almost policy wonkish kind of guy, very cerebral
and somebody who was considered kind of almost cool and aloof and and distant
and not a party guy.
And in the years that I worked for him, my job was to be with him
on the road and be kind of the conduit between him and the office
and all of the policy papers going back and forth and so forth.
And then we would every, I don't know what, every six or eight weeks,
we'd have a weekend off and we'd go our separate ways.
And I wouldn't ask what he was doing.
He wouldn't ask what I was doing.
We'd be glad to have a little break from each other.
But we've stayed very close through all the years, even now.
And, you know, it was one of those, obviously,
I think he would say it was a terrible misjudgment
that he got himself in the situation that he did.
But he was definitely the movie was called The Front Runner.
He was considered the front runner.
And a lot of things happen in politics and nothing's a sure thing.
But he certainly had a good shot at it.
Was politics what you expected it to be as a wide eyed boy in Pittsburgh
and you end up in Washington?
Was it all that you expected it to be or more or less?
That's such a good question.
It both was and it wasn't.
I would say it was in terms of the learning curve.
You learn a tremendous amount.
Whatever's on the front page of the paper, leading the news
is what you're working on that day.
And so you just, you know, I feel like if you have a couple of years
experience doing that, you're prepared to do almost anything.
It was probably a little bit.
I left working in the Senate in 1992 after Senator Hart.
I worked for one other senator named Bob Carey from Nebraska.
And that was around the time where things started to get really,
really divisive, at least in American politics.
And very hard to get things done.
And I had this sense of kind of standing behind the curtain
or sitting in the back row, listening to arguments
that had been made over and over and over again and filibusters
and delay and debate and nothing happening.
And that part got frustrating.
And, you know, it was I feel fortunate that at the beginning of the time
when I started working there in the early 80s, we got quite a few things done.
It's never quite as idyllic as, you know, people portray the old days.
They were still rough and tumble and a lot of political divisiveness.
But now it's not the place where you can make big things happen.
So on the one sense, I felt like I learned a ton.
On the other hand, I got a little frustrated for how slowly things moved.
The West Wing. I love that show.
Is it anything like that?
Because I love that president.
I loved all those characters and the hustle and bustle of the White House.
You know, it just it made me want to just jump into those scenes.
Yeah. Well, you know, since Senator Hart didn't win,
I didn't make it into the White House that way.
I've been there a number of times for other things,
but it does feel pretty, pretty close, as a matter of fact. Yeah.
And as I say, you know, even watching the West Wing,
you do get the sense of like whatever is driving the news that day.
You've got to react to, you got to respond to, you got to get smart about.
So I think it was pretty realistic in terms of politics at the moment.
There's obviously a lot with Trump and then he left and now Joe Biden.
Do you sort of see a good positive future moving forward in politics in the states?
I think we're still in for a little bit of a of a rough patch.
There's still a lot of division.
I don't quite understand it completely.
You know, there was a sense that, you know, Trump was such a divisive president,
that there was a kind of the question a lot of us had afterwards is,
can you can some of the poison be put back in the bottle?
And, you know, I think Biden has whether you agree with him or not,
he's tried to bring more of a civil tone to the discourse and,
you know, not demonize people and and so forth.
So I don't know. I think it's going to be a few years.
There's a number of, you know, members of our government now who are still debating
whether the results of the election, you know, were legitimate,
you know, whether it was a rigged election.
All the evidence is that it was legitimate, but that doesn't stop people from debating it.
So I don't know. I think it's going to I think we're going to be divided
for some time going forward.
Hopefully, there will be a generation of leaders that comes up that says,
you know, we can we can disagree, but we can we can still be civil.
And they're saying that Trump, he might have another run in in a couple of years time.
And well, for us, looking into you, because we look at America
and in England for so much here in Australia, it's it's just incredible
that he could have another go.
It must have looked insane.
I can't imagine what it looked like. It felt insane.
I mean, every day for four years, you just couldn't catch your breath.
There was just so much craziness happening. That's true.
So what makes you you're in Washington, you're with these politicians
and you say, you know what?
I want to I want to help hunger.
I want to help kids in particular.
I want to try to put some money into this area.
And hundreds of millions of dollars later, here we are.
What was your drive to to sort hunger out in the states?
Around the time that I that Senator Hart had run for president
the first time in 1984, and this sounds like ancient history now
a long time ago, but right around then, I'd worked for him for quite some time.
I wasn't burnt out in any way.
He was going to be the front runner next time around.
But I'd also wanted to have, you know, more of an impact.
And it felt like you can have just being on a campaign.
And it was intersected with this catastrophic
humanitarian event in Ethiopia, one of the worst famines
they've ever had in Ethiopia.
And Ethiopia has a lot of them.
But it was, you know, millions of people expected to die.
And it was the beginning of Bob Geldof and Live Aid.
And we are the world and USA for Africa.
A lot of things happen then.
And that same vein, it kind of was a prompt for me
to try to do something and make a contribution,
at least on the private sector or the nonprofit side.
And so had this notion that we could start an organization
that would tap into the livelihoods and the talents of people
who made their living feeding people chefs and restaurateurs
and culinary professionals and see if we could generate funds
that would impact places like Ethiopia.
It ended up to be a lot of our work in the United States now and still is.
But that was the initial impact.
And just this notion, frankly, you know,
what really happened, Gus, as I was reading,
I was sitting in a traffic jam in Washington, D.C.
now that you ask the question, I'm remembering it.
And I was reading a headline in The Washington Post
that said 300,000 to die this summer.
I had two reactions.
One reaction was like, gosh, that's that's an unbelievable tragedy.
And the second reaction was a little bit more introspective.
It was, wait a second, I'm having a thought of my own
for the first time in about 10 years
because I just like, you know, maybe like a character on West Wing.
I processed everything through what should Senator Hart say about this.
And I hadn't really thought about what I felt about things.
And when I started to feel something, I said, maybe I should stick with that.
That could be important.
So from that sort of traffic jam and sitting in the car to where we are now,
there's been so many moments, I suppose, where, you know,
you've had lots of really good moments and obviously moments
which are a little bit more difficult as you try to build it.
What was it like?
Because I know your sister was a big part of it as well.
What was it like from that moment to build what you've got now?
Yeah, well, you know, like anything else, a lot of ups and downs.
I think for us, it was a matter of being patient and having a long term vision
or at least a long term commitment to what we're doing.
You know, any big problem that you want to solve,
you know, this from your work and other things that we're we're both involved in.
If it's if it's a really tough problem, it's going to take a while to solve.
These things don't get fixed overnight.
And you've got to create the political will and you've got to generate the money
And so for some reason, we just had this sense that we're going to have to do this
So we started with a two thousand dollar cash advance on a on a credit card.
And we sent out a thousand letters.
I got a, you know, the inventor of the Apple Macintosh was Steve Wozniak,
who worked with Steve Jobs.
And I knew Steve Wozniak from politics from he was a Gary Hart supporter.
So I asked him if he would donate a computer to us.
And, you know, in those days, a computer was a box about this big.
And he sent one and he sent a printer and we sent out a thousand letters
to chefs and restaurateurs saying, would you be part of this effort
to organize the culinary community?
Would you send us some money?
And that's not one person sent anything back out of a thousand letters.
And for some strange reason, we sent out a second thousand
and we got one back from a great chef here named Alice Waters,
who has a iconic restaurant in California called Chez Panisse.
And she sent five hundred dollars and a note saying,
let me know what else I can do.
And I immediately wrote her back and I said, you can sign the letters
because nobody answers mine.
And we ended up with about 50 responses and I asked some of them to reach out.
And anyhow, it was, you know, a lot of a lot of ups and downs along the way.
Like anything else, you get to a certain tipping point
where you start to have critical mass and then things start to start to roll.
And how big was it for you to have your sister
alongside you to to help you with this?
And how long was it just you guys before you started building your team?
It made a major difference.
You know, I'm not sure anyone's ever asked me that question, Gus,
but it's such a good question because, you know, I found that to have a partner
that you can bounce ideas off of and commiserate or be sad with or be happy
with or, you know, just somebody to check your ideas was really invaluable.
My sister's she'd actually worked in Gary Hart's campaign as well.
She's relentless.
She's persistent.
She's idealistic.
Nothing discourages her.
And so, you know, we we quickly brought on at least two other people.
But for, you know, for a couple of years, it was just four of us today.
We have a staff of about 270.
So it's grown quite a bit, but it wouldn't have been possible without her.
And we still we're still sitting next to each other 35 years later.
Well, the fact that you're still mates and you look at each other
and you can have those moments, like you say, ups and downs
and you've got through it together is quite incredible.
I'm not sure if I could do that with my brother.
Could I ask you exactly for people who don't understand the charity
and the movement, exactly what you do to make sure that people aren't hungry?
Yeah. So, you know, share our strength is based on the notion
that we've all got a strength to share, that everybody has something to to give back
and that that can have an impact.
And so the strength that we looked at initially, as I mentioned,
was working with chefs and restaurateurs and people in the food industry
since they made their livelihoods from feeding people.
And so we raised money in a variety of ways
through food and wine events and auctions and dinners and corporate partnerships
cause related marketing.
But what we did with the money was really what was the important thing.
And we did two things.
One was we granted to a lot of organizations
who were on the front lines of the fight against hunger,
whether they were food banks or food pantries
or other types of emergency food assistance.
And then we realized that there was actually an even bigger opportunity
to create systemic, you know, in the in the U.S.
We've got a school lunch and a school breakfast program.
It's in almost all of the public schools.
And it was actually started by admirals and generals after World War
Two, who came back to Congress in 1946 and said, by the end of the war,
our troops were not strong enough.
We've got to we've got to feed kids better in school
if we want to have a strong army and good national security.
That's where it began.
And one of the things that we found about 10 years ago
was that 22 million kids in the United States getting a free school lunch.
All are eligible for breakfast, but only nine million were getting it of the 22.
And in the summertime, when schools were closed,
there's a summer meals program, but only three million were getting it.
And the crazy thing, because it was bought and paid for for all 22 million.
So, you know, we always have these battles about is there enough money for this?
Can we get more money for that?
We had the money, but there were all these bureaucratic barriers
to kids participating in these programs.
So we went about knocking them down.
Kids couldn't get to school early enough to get to breakfast,
to get to the cafeteria before school started.
So we moved breakfast to the classrooms
and had to do everything you need to do to retrofit the classrooms
to feed kids instead of the cafeteria.
So we've added millions of kids to school breakfast.
We've created summer meal sites during the pandemic.
We went when all the schools were closed.
We had to create transportation and equipment systems to feed kids at home.
So that's essentially what we do. The focus is childhood hunger.
We we end up feeding lots of other families and people in the course of that.
But kind of the front facing part of what we do is mostly around child hunger.
Just quickly interrupting the episode to say a very big thank you
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And let's get back into the episode.
You must be amazed at how from starting with your sister
with that two thousand dollar cash advance on the credit card
to where you are now, do you have to actually spend some time looking back
and and realizing that what you've done?
Well, not that much looking back just because there's still so much to do.
I mean, I appreciate what you're saying.
And, you know, I'm really I feel fortunate to get to work with the team
that I work with and blessed to do the work and proud of it, certainly.
But, you know, there's just still so much more to do, not only to feed kids to get,
but to get to the root causes of of why they're hungry in the first place.
So mostly focused on the work ahead rather than the work behind.
Yeah, we had a moment last week in in Australia
where we had a suicide rate go down by five point four percent.
And we celebrated it for a New York minute and then we just got on with it.
Right. Because you you realize that there's still way too many people
that are that are going through pain and stress.
But I mean, some of that's got to be the direct result of your work, though. Right.
That's why we celebrated. Yeah, that's right.
And it was just a moment, but we got back into onto the horse.
But I know what you mean.
You you celebrate the highs, but you get back on the horse. Yeah.
I wanted to talk to you about being someone in your position.
You get to go to some pretty cool places and to do some teaching to some
some smart kids. You've been teaching at Harvard and Stanford and so forth.
What do you think of those key straits that leaders and entrepreneurs must have?
And do you enjoy that experience?
Yeah, well, I think mostly I learn a lot when I go teach,
particularly young students, they are not only smart, but they can be challenging
and they don't see the grays in the world.
They see a lot of blacks and whites, which is the way I was when I was young.
And I think that really motivates you.
A couple of things I usually try to get across with students is one in terms of,
you know, your own career or life's path.
I always want people to know that they they rarely go in a in a straight line.
Success is rarely an unbroken line from one point to another.
And I, you know, always share with them that, you know,
I was the son of a mom who who died from a from a secanol overdose,
that I was principal architect of three losing presidential campaigns,
two of Senator Hart's and one of Senator Carey's.
But after I went to law school, I took the bar exam and I failed it twice.
But the point is, it's not about your successes or failures.
It's like anything else.
It's what you do with them, what you learn from them, what you take away from them.
So that's always one thing that I want folks to understand.
But the other is just, you know, the importance of, you know,
what I think of as kind of leading with authenticity and how you, you know,
I don't believe that you should be like
guilting people into action or kind of brow beating them or trying to persuade them.
I think you have to give people an experience and emotion somehow recreate.
Like when I think about learning that 300,000 people were going to die in Ethiopia
and I ended up going to Ethiopia several times.
Not everybody can go to Ethiopia.
But how do you take that privilege of being able to bear witness,
to be able to go and see and hear and feel things and share it with other people
so they maybe will have at least some version of the emotional response
that you had to it?
To me, that's what authentic leadership is about.
It's not a lot of the things that are in the handy how to books
that are sold on leadership.
But, you know, really about giving people an opportunity
to see where they can make a difference.
When you went to Ethiopia, did that did that experience
just lock in your drive and your passion to never give up when it comes to hunger?
It did. And, you know, in a variety of ways, you know, first of all,
it's much more life and death there than it is in the United States,
where there's malnutrition and a lot of food insecurity,
but not the same kind of desperate hunger.
I also had an experience there, Gus,
where I was in the back of a classroom at a school
where we were standing there and the kids were being taught.
And they, you know, there was a school meals program in this school
that was really just like almost like a thatched roof dirt hut in Ethiopia.
And there was a young woman who came over to me.
I think she must have been 10 years old.
And she just said, you know, God bless you for coming here.
And I asked her her name.
Her name was Alima Dari.
And, you know, we exchanged notes and we ended up corresponding for a while.
But then about a year later, a friend of mine who I work with named Chuck
Schofield was going to Ethiopia on a trip that I couldn't go on.
And I'd asked him to, you know, take a package for Lima.
And he went and I didn't hear from him and a couple of weeks went by.
And that was very unusual.
And Chuck and I are in constant touch.
And finally, he called me up and he said, and we were in the process,
by the way, of building a hospital next to a Lima school.
And I remember he called me up and he said, you know, I hate like heck
to tell you this, but Lima died from cerebral malaria and the hospital
wasn't finished, and so they had to take her to the hospital in Addis Ababa.
They didn't get her there in time.
It was a long journey.
And it just gave me that sense of, you know, I think Dr.
Martin Luther King once said that, you know, in this unfolding
conundrum of life and history, there is such a thing as being too late.
That, you know, procrastination is the thief of time.
And we weren't procrastinating, but we were too late.
And it just created a sense of urgency, a sense that, you know,
what you do today could really impact someone's life tomorrow.
You know this better than anybody from your work, but it's real.
That connection is real.
And you can be too late unless you keep that drive and that fire going.
I'm so sorry to hear that story.
I could see the connection you had as you talked about her
when you first met her to to then that result at the end.
It's just so sad.
Yeah, it was brutal.
I've got a number of pictures that are in the house.
And I just, you know, I just like when it didn't see it coming, you know,
I suppose that's one of those stories that does change your life.
You know, you would have come across a few in your time.
Oh, that's rocked me a little bit.
Yeah, no, me too.
So how do you get back on the horse when you get that type of situation?
Do you do you take a day and then you go, OK, well, that's never going to happen again.
How does your mind work?
Yeah, for me, you know, not and not everybody's like this.
And I don't expect them to be for me.
It creates a real sense of urgency.
You know, we've had times during the pandemic here where are, you know,
when the hunger issue spiked up so high as there was so much suffering.
And some of our staff, understandably, totally appropriately,
were just like, I need some time.
I need a I need some space from this.
But I'm kind of the opposite.
I'm just like, you know, for whatever reason, I want to get right to it.
And it just makes me think that, you know, there's not a moment to waste.
Obviously, we have to take care of ourselves and we've got to make sure that,
you know, we're not we're not of use to anybody else if we're not OK.
So we've got to make sure that, you know, we're healthy physically and mentally.
But in my case, I don't know, I guess the work is therapy.
I just I want to get right back to it.
Yeah, I feel the same way.
I never feel tired doing work when you're doing it
for something that you're so passionate about.
Most famous men, famous women always have a partner
or someone that is incredibly important to them.
And our mutual friend told me to ask a couple of questions.
One was about your partner.
And could you just explain what she means to you
and how your life has been because of her?
Yeah, well, no, Rosemary, for sure, is the is the secret sauce in all of this.
We got married, you know, maybe 18 years ago and been together for about 25.
But she's got, you know, the most exquisite sense of being kind of present
in the moment of anybody I've ever met and taught me.
And I was I was married once before
and didn't have a sense until I met Rosemary.
And I give her all the credit
that your marriage is and your family is at the center of what you do
and everything else, you know, kind of orbits around it.
My work used to be at the center of what I do.
It's still very important to me.
And my family rotated around it.
But Rosemary helped me with the course correction there.
And that's made life awfully good.
So kids, how many kids have you got and what are they doing?
So I've got a son who's 36 now.
He's a radio engineer in Washington, D.C. and a daughter who's 31.
She's an architect in Texas.
And Rosemary and I have a 16 and a half year old Nate,
who is a junior in high school.
He's also a junior firefighter.
And about three years ago, when he was too young to be a firefighter,
he talked me into becoming a volunteer firefighter, which I do in Maine.
And in fact, we're headed there in a little while for a training we have tonight.
But Nate's argument, I think you'll appreciate this, Gus.
You know, I didn't think I was cut out to be a firefighter.
I didn't think I'd be very good at it and that there wasn't time in my life
or anything else.
And Nate one day said to me, as I was trying to push this idea off,
he said, Dad, did it ever occur to you that if you were a firefighter,
you'd actually be saving lives instead of typing on your laptop
and telling yourself that you're saving lives?
Kids can be brutal, can't they?
Yeah, they can be brutal.
But anyhow, it's turned out to be this incredibly rewarding thing
that we get to do together.
And he's a wonderful, wonderful kid that I learn a ton from.
Someone told me one day, hang around the oldies,
but listen to the youngsters, you know, that's sort of the way
to keep yourself young. Yes.
Jaco did say you're a firey and there was a hilarious story.
He didn't tell me the story, but he said that you might have a hilarious story
about firefighting one day.
I don't know if that tricks a memory for you.
Oh, gosh. Well, there are a bunch of them.
Of course, I did a lot of things wrong when I when I first became a firefighter.
There's a lot of on the job training.
And as I say, I'm not particularly good at these things.
One story that I that I really take a lesson from
and I've sent you a couple of them, but one that, you know,
I really learned from was when I was very early being a firefighter,
there was a call for a woman who was having a seizure at a restaurant.
And Nate happened to be in the car with me when the call came.
And so we went to it together.
Usually we go to the fire station and jump on the truck.
In this case, I went straight to the to the restaurant.
When I got there, I saw the ambulance was out in front
and another firefighter's car was there.
I said to Nate, I said, look, I'm going to park two doors away.
I don't want to be in the way.
You stay in the car.
I'll help this team and I'll I'll be right back.
So I go and do all that.
I get back in the car and it looks very upset with me.
And I was like, buddy, what's the matter?
And he says, we'll talk about it when we get home.
I was like, we'll talk about it when we get home.
Wow. So home was only about 10 minutes away.
So we get home and I was like, buddy, I said, what is it?
He says, Dad, he said, I know you're trying the best that you can.
When I hear you say, I don't want to be in the way,
that tells me that you're not thinking of yourself as a firefighter,
that you haven't internalized it.
They said, unless you have a vision, dad, of who you are and what you can be,
you're not going to get things right.
Wow. Pretty good for a 14 year old.
Well, hey, he's the one that's going to be president one day.
I think you're right. I think you're right.
What do you do for you? Like you, you've served all your life.
What do you do for you to just give yourself a little bit of space or time
or to give you that moment just to take a breath?
Yeah, well, certainly time with family, I think makes a huge difference.
I bike a lot. My wife and I both bike together, you know, maybe 25,
30 miles a day when we can.
We do a ride for Share Our Strength that raises money for our work
called Chef Cycle, and it's a 300 mile ride over three days.
So it's three century rides in a row.
And that's been a, you know, great challenge both to get ready for it.
I'm a little older than most of the riders.
So just getting that done was was big.
And, you know, I read a lot to get up early.
I need a little bit of a long time every day.
Well, before I finish off the podcast with our fast five questions,
where do you see yourself in the next five, 10, 15 years?
What's Billy Shaw going to be doing?
I'm going to be visiting Australia because I really need to spend some time with you.
Yes, I can't believe we've only met in the last year or so.
And it's all been virtual.
But, you know, in our family really does want to come to Australia.
So that's one thing.
I probably write a little bit more.
I've done a few books in the past.
I did a book called The Cathedral Within, which was using cathedral
building as a metaphor for how you can, you know, the great cathedrals
all took hundreds of years to build.
So the only thing that anybody who worked on them knew was that
that they were going to work on them their entire life and not see their work finished.
And so certainly in the nonprofit sector, in the kind of the mission
driven space that you and I live in.
We know that our work may take, you know, decades or centuries
and we may not personally get to see the end point.
But that doesn't mean it's not worth dedicating ourselves to.
So I'd like to write a little bit more and get this job done
in terms of ending childhood hunger.
I actually think it's a solvable problem.
I think we're going to succeed.
I've got no doubt if you put your mind to it, that's what's going to happen.
OK, Billy, Fast Five, your favorite quote.
Is there a quote or a saying that you heard or you live your life by?
Well, there was a great Catholic relief worker named Dorothy Day
who said the great revolution that we need is the revolution
within each and every one of us, a revolution of the heart.
So actually, the first book I wrote was called Revolution of the Heart
for that reason, because, you know, so much of this work is
really about changing people inside.
Beautiful. Favorite holiday destination, that one place, you know, if you go to,
you're going to have fun or you're going to be relaxed, get what you need.
That'll be Maine for us, the coast of Maine, for sure.
How about you, by the way?
For me, Fiji or New York, I love the people.
I love that. I know that you couldn't get two more different,
but depends what headspace I'm in, if I'm just I had a bit of a tragedy
a couple of years ago and I just took my youngest daughter to Fiji
and we just sat around a pool and at 10 o'clock every morning,
we went to the spa and we got a massage and then we sat by the pool
and then we got to drinks early and she had a pink lemonade or a mocktail
and I had a beer and then we had an early dinner and I just went back and slept
and we watched a movie and we did that for 10 days.
And that's exactly what it's exactly what I needed.
And a couple of years earlier, I was in New York with you and and Deb
and with my wife, and we just literally every night went somewhere
fantastic and did something fantastic or saw a fantastic show.
And you know what it's like living with you, you know, you go places
that you don't normally go to.
So you're up for 20 hours of every day and did that for a week.
So I can do both.
And that's why New York and Fiji are just so so important to me.
I just love them both so much.
Yeah. Pretty good combo.
Pretty good. Favorite movie.
Favorite movie. Gosh.
I think it'd be I think I'd be torn between Casablanca and the Big Chill.
They're both pretty different.
I love them both. It's like Fiji and New York.
That's great. Two great flicks.
And most importantly,
Shoren Partners, who are sponsoring this podcast series,
Not an Overnight Success, are giving all, I guess,
10,000 Australian dollars to give to a charity of your choice.
So who would you like to give that money to?
Well, can I do Gotcha for Life?
Oh, you certainly can.
That's where I'd like it to go.
I just love that. I'm so inspired by the work you're doing.
That's that's that would be my choice for sure.
Thank you, Billy. That's very, very kind.
Well, think about it, that every forty dollars Ozzy
sits someone in our workshop that they wouldn't normally get into the workshop.
So there could be over, you know, hundreds of kids now
that will get that spot because of your generosity.
So thank you very much, brother.
I'm really thrilled to have the opportunity. Thank you.
And I cannot wait for us to be in the same room.
Big bear hug, glass of wine and just continue our conversations.
I really enjoy chatting to you and thanks so much for your time.
Likewise, New York or Australia,
one or the other or Fiji. Let's do all three.
All right. Thanks for having me.
Well, that was Billy Shaw.
And what I loved about that chat was that he's actually a bit of a mentor to me now.
He's someone that Hugh Jackman put me onto about a year ago
when I was thinking about things with my foundation, Gotcha for Life.
And he was such a calming influence.
And I thought not many people probably know him in Australia.
So let's bring him across to Australian shores, at least in a podcast.
And just to hear his compassion, to hear his knowledge
and his passion for ending world hunger, just incredible man
and a man that I cannot wait to meet in the flesh in a few months time
when I eventually get over there and give him a big bear hug in New York City.
Coming up next on Not an Overnight Success is an old friend of mine, Maddie Johns.
Maddie Johns was a legendary Australian, international
and New South Wales state of origin player.
He's also a successful television and radio broadcaster,
a podcast presenter, author and actor.
Maddie and I spent eight years of our lives doing breakfast radio
together on the grill team.
And what I love about Maddie is he is who he is.
He's a knockabout.
He has a great sense of humour and always sees the fun in every situation.
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So our episodes update as they are released.
A big thank you to Shaw and Partners Financial Services,
who have generously supported this podcast and also donated
$10,000 to the charity of choice of each of our guests
to thank them for their time.
Shaw and Partners are an Australian investment and wealth management firm
who manage over $28 billion of assets under advice.
With seven offices around Australia, Shaw and Partners Act for
and on behalf of individuals, institutions, corporates and charities.
For more info, you can check out their website at shawandpartners.com.au
That's S-H-A-W for Shaw.
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and preserving wealth.